Gov. Cuomo has set ambitious environmental goals and launched a broad remake of state energy policy to achieve them. But it's not yet clear how the costs and benefits of the moves will affect low-income households.

After months of discussion, state energy officials last week approved a new fund for clean-energy projects in New York—part of an ambitious effort by the Cuomo administration to remake the way power is generated, distributed and paid for.

Even if it has eluded much coverage in the mainstream press, insiders have noticed the breadth and boldness of Gov. Cuomo’s energy plans. An energy industry blog has said that “New York is arguably taking the most ambitious, comprehensive approach to utility market reform,” and GreenTechMedia.com once called it “the country’s most ambitious statewide grid-edge reform.”

Some advocates, however, worry that the brave new future of electricity in the Empire State could leave low-income New Yorkers behind.

Earlier this week, a City Limits investigation of an earlier clean-energy program found that it had fallen well short of expectations. Launched during the administration of Gov. David Paterson, Green Jobs/Green New York aimed to retrofit tens of thousands of homes, create thousands of jobs and help low-income households participate in large numbers, but its performance didn’t match initial hopes.

Cuomo launched his own initiative, called Reforming the Energy Vision, in 2014. It dovetails with the governor’s goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and increasing the role of renewable energy in New York. REV is supposed to help businesses and households reach those environmental targets while also creating jobs and reducing the state’s high electricity rates.

New world, old grid

The idea behind REV is that the challenge of climate change and innovations in how power is generated are a bad fit for the way New Yorkers pay for electricity. Nowadays, customers with solar panels may sell energy back to a grid designed to send power in the other direction. Reduced electricity usage, while a boon to the environment, poses a problem for utility companies whose revenue comes from usage fees. And much of the high cost of electricity in New York is blamed on a big gap between the average need for power and peak demand, because the costly infrastructure needed to meet peak demand has to be supported even though it’s usually not needed. There’s probably a technological solution to that, but the market for such a fix has yet to develop.

“It is calling into question the old utility model,” Anthony Giancatarino, the director of policy and strategy at the Center for Social Inclusion, says of REV .”Can we really get carbon emissions down, can we really get affordability, can we really be investing in renewable energy with an antiquated system?”

REV is supposed to make it easier for utilities, customers, investors, inventors and others to react to those challenges. One part of the vision involves rewriting regulations for utilities. Another aims to reduce demand by customers of the New York Power Authority, which generates power used by public entities like the MTA, Port Authority and NYCHA.

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The final piece is the Clean Energy Fund, which was okayed last week by the state’s Public Service Commission. CEF aims to develop a market to support the changes the state’s energy system needs. It includes NY-Sun, which offers solar-energy investments, and the NY Green Bank, which is supposed to leverage private investment in clean energy. There’s also a market development fund and a pool of money for innovation and research. All told, the fund is supposed to spend $5 billion over 10 years. According to the governor’s office, it should save consumers $39 billion over that period.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority will oversee the Clean Energy Fund, which takes over most of the work that was part of the Green Jobs/Green New York Program. Back in 2009, predictions were that the initiative would create 14,000 jobs and lead to retrofits a million homes, but it appears just over 1,000 jobs and around 30,000 retrofits were generated.

Green Jobs was credited with achieving savings for some customers and pioneering new financing mechanisms for clean power. City Limits found, however, that underwriting criteria made it hard for some low-income households to qualify for loans under Green Jobs/Green New York. A complex application process, disparities in the cost of living, fundamental repair needs in some homes, and the way the program sized up costs and benefits also slowed the program down.

The biggest barrier, advocates for low-income people said, was that poor people were reluctant to take on new debt to pay for retrofits.

Lessons learned?

NYSERDA did not make a representative available for an interview, so it’s not clear whether the agency believes the Green Jobs experience offered any lessons for designing the Clean Energy Fund. But there are signals that the authority now better grasps the unique challenges of serving poorer New Yorkers. “[Low- and moderate-income] residents are financially stressed, and lack the capital or willingness to take on debt to cover energy efficiency and distributed generation investments, despite the attractive economic value of these investments,” NYSERDA wrote in documents during the approval process for the Fund. In announcing the Fund last week, the governor’s office noted that “At least $234.5 million must be invested in initiatives that benefit low-to-moderate income New Yorkers during the first three years.”

Advocates had pushed for a larger share to be earmarked for lower-income households, but feel they achieved a victory in getting nearly $80 million a year set aside through 2018.

Exactly what that help will look like is uncertain, however, because NYSERDA is still drafting several parts of the plan, including the one pertaining to low- and moderate-income households.

The concern, says Jessica Azulay, program director at Alliance for a Green Economy, is that for all its interest in innovation, the Clean Energy Fund still relies primarily on the market to deliver cheaper, cleaner power to New Yorkers.

“I’m very skeptical of that,” she says. “The markets tend to favor people with money. They tend to favor businesses that already have advantages. What will the opportunity really be for low- and moderate-income people in New York? If the opportunity is being able to be an energy producer yourself, or better manage your demand [through use of technology], people who can’t afford those are potentially going to be left behind.”

REV will probably generate great ideas, Azulay says—like devices that, without any help from the consumer, get his washing machine and dryer to run at times of day when power demand is low—but in a market environment, those tools will come with a price-tag that could be beyond some consumers’ means.

And that’s just for the selling that’s legit. There’s also the threat of scams that prey on the poor. “Without really strong market protect there’s an opportunity for predatory marketing,” Azulay says.

Given how important REV and the Clean Energy Fund will be to the state’s environmental and economic future, the lack of public awareness is a problem. The obscurity is partly a result, no doubt, of how technically complex the topic can get. But Giancatarino believes state government has failed to keep New Yorkers informed and involved: “They need to do a better job engaging the public.”

It’s a discussion, he adds, that should be about not just electric power, but social power as well. Given gaping inequality in New York, “We can’t talk about changing the grid and not have vastly different social outcomes,” he says. “This is transformative and you’re missing an opportunity to really think about economics.”

This video is part of City Limits investigation of the Green Jobs/Green New York program, produced by the members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting class at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Click here to read, watch and listen more.

This video is part of City Limits investigation of the Green Jobs/Green New York program, produced by the members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting class at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Click here to read, watch and listen more.

Van Jones, the writer and advocate, is widely credited with introducing the term 'green jobs' into common use.

Seven years ago, New York State was poised for a so-called green jobs revolution. That didn’t exactly happen. Jobs did come, but only a fraction of what was predicted. And it wasn’t just local leaders who were making these promises; it was coming from all levels of government, nonprofits and the private sector.

In fact, green jobs have been created, but not in the way that anyone expected. Hear what happened:

]]>https://citylimits.org/2016/01/26/audio-the-new-math-on-green-jobs/feed/0Why a Green Jobs Program Produced So Few Jobshttps://citylimits.org/2016/01/26/why-a-green-jobs-program-produced-so-few-jobs/
https://citylimits.org/2016/01/26/why-a-green-jobs-program-produced-so-few-jobs/#commentsTue, 26 Jan 2016 15:07:09 +0000http://citylimits.org/?p=345506

SUNY

While community groups struggled to get clients through green-jobs training programs, some productive partnerships did develop. One involved SUNY Ulster County, which hosts a Building Performance Institute training certification center.

In 1995, Michael D’Arcy returned home to Kingston, N.Y. after serving his country as a Marine. He wanted to help his fellow veterans find jobs, and in 2011 was hired on as a regional energy coach at Rural Ulster Preservation Corporation, or RUPCO. The local community-based organization had just won a two-year contract with NYSERDA to take part in the Green Jobs-Green New York program.

The program’s hopes were to increase energy efficiency within homes through weatherization and retrofitting services, and at the same time employ thousands across the state by providing Building Performance Institute* green jobs training certification.

Because CBOs like RUPCO work to establish trust within their communities, NYSERDA set out to hire one CBO in each of 13 regions throughout the state to spread the word about the Green Jobs-Green New York initiative. The CBOs’ tasks included encouraging participation in the energy efficiency programs, bringing awareness to the workforce training opportunities and assisting people in enrolling in all the efforts.

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In 2010, NYSERDA set a budget of $10 million for Green New York outreach and marketing. As many as 18 CBOs have since been involved, and 12 still are on board.

Outreach coordinators like D’Arcy would educate homeowners on how they could make their homes cheaper via energy efficiency, while simultaneously providing more jobs.

“The plan was to increase awareness to the program, get consumers in, increase the work given to contractors,” D’Arcy says.

But five years later, little progress has been made. Data released of the CBOs selected during the first-round and second-round requests for proposals between 2011 and 2016 show that of 413 people enrolled in training, 236 people completed the training, 98 were connected to employers and only 83 throughout the state of New York have been employed.

According to the 2015 GJGNY Annual Report, increased demand for skilled labor was anticipated based on consumer demand increasing—in other words, homeowners going green would boost the need for contractors to retrofit homes. The workforce development programs were designed around that anticipated demand.

Through posting demands for workers on social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, RUPCO hoped to find jobs for more people by increasing contractors’ workforce to keep up with the needs.

“What did work was leveraging those partnerships with contractors and getting them busy, and some of them did increase their staff,” D’Arcy says.

But he never was able to find out whether any veterans were hired.

“I didn’t get any proof on that,” he says, “so that’s a sort of discouraging part.”

And non-veterans didn’t fare much better.

The most recent GJGNY annual report shows that despite the 2,387 home performance applications received by RUPCO and the more than half of those assessments completed, just 326 retrofits were completed. Though D’Arcy says that his CBO saw success in many areas, overall, few were hired.

“It hasn’t been as successful as I’d like to see it or we’d like to see it,” D’Arcy says. “So the success story that I tell about workforce development is really so minute.”

Lessons learned

D’Arcy says some of the positives he did see include forming partnerships both with the Department of Labor and with training centers where job seekers could become certified. He also says getting RUPCO’s staff themselves BPI certified was huge progress.

“That gives us more credibility when we’re out there talking from the point of view of a contractor,” he says.

D’Arcy says giving public presentations on workforce development was also helpful, as was visiting underserved places in New York to make them aware of CBOs and establishing relationships with contractors in areas available for workforce development.

“There are so many people who don’t know about any of these programs, and it’s not like I can go and clone a hundred of me and go out and do it,” he says. “So I think there has to be a little bit more of a broader brush approach to marketing it than relying on contractors to go and push the program.”

One thing D’Arcy says helped the CBO with its task at hand was the involvement of the nearby State University of New York community colleges.

Christopher Marx directs the continuing professional education department at SUNY Ulster County and he’s also a member of the RUPCO board. When RUPCO signed with NYSERDA, it teamed up with SUNY, which hosts a Building Performance Institute training certification center, in the outreach effort.

“We were building the capacity, they were building the market,” Marx says. “So they were working with homeowners and businesses to get these energy audits and then to do the upgrades that would then employ the people that would come through the programs that we created.”

“We worked with our regional community colleges in the SUNY system to apply for a number of grants, and got quite a bit of support from NYSERDA,” Marx says.

But Marx says the results were different from what he expected.

“What we thought was going to happen, which was what everybody kind of thought would happen, was that this whole movement toward green building science techniques and clean energy systems was taking off on everyone’s roof, with all kinds of facilities, would kind of take hold and create the need for this new green workforce,” he says.

But instead of people looking to develop new careers in this area, Marx says the professionals who were already working in the field were the ones looking for certification. “So our courses were being filled with electricians and plumbers and contractors, carpenters, architects, engineers who are already doing the work.”

Marx says he and his colleagues were optimistic that the experts in the field would create a green workforce, but the numbers did not meet their expectations.

“We still don’t see a lot of new careers or new career opportunities necessarily for someone coming into these training programs,” he says.

“Six years ago, a little thing called the recession happened and we’re still kinda clawing our way out of that, and that affected all the industry,” he says.

Marx says economic growth stalled over the past five years and the statistics on new construction and renovation showed that investment in the area decreased significantly during that time. So did the number of jobs in those trades.

D’Arcy says NYSERDA needs more funds allocated to outreach. Although NYSERDA put out a public opportunity notice that helped fund on-the-job training for home performance contractors and new hires, it drew little interest.

“I’m not sure that there’s incentive out there enough for contractors and for potential employees to get into the program,” he says.

Another CBO in upstate New York that covers the largest geographic area of any CBO involved in GJGNY also had issues getting people involved in workforce development.

An energy coordinator—who asked not to be named because NYSERDA told him he could not speak to the press—says contractors in his area felt that the opportunity to take part in the workforce training program offered little reward for those already working in the field. Despite the 393 home performance applications his CBO received and the more than half that number of assessments that were completed, just 53 retrofits were completed.

“I think a lot of the small contractors just say, ‘You know I’ve got enough work now, why do I want totake this on, expanding to another area where it’s going to take me forever to get a job complete?'” he says. “That was the initial challenge.”

Aside from hours of driving from one job to the next, the contractors were also daunted with the amount of paperwork that comes with participating in the program.

“You have to put it into a TREAT [energy audit software] report, a lot of data entry into computer work,” he says. “A lot of people didn’t have the time or if they did have the time, they didn’t have the skills, and it was hard for them to come to that capacity and resources.”

Jen Monroe launched a one-woman business, Adirondack Efficiency, just to handle all the tedious paperwork that came with NYSERDA’s green job audits.

“So they’re able to do what they do best which is, you know, changing out heating systems and insulating houses and I get, they pay me to do the audit,” says Monroe, who previously worked for a company that recruited contractors for the NYSERDA program.

“It is so insanely complicated and bureaucratic, it’s crazy that it works at all,” Monroe says. “It still boggles my mind three years into it how complicated it is, and it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Monroe says paperwork is just one issue in the North Country region. Fact is, there are few contractors to take on the work in that vast area of the state.

“We have huge need for efficiency services because it’s the coldest part of the state and the lowest income and it’s very rural, so I’m going out and promoting these programs, and it’s like, ‘Oh but sorry, there’s no contractors that can actually do the work,'” Monroe says. Monroe also heard that companies didn’t want to invest in equipment without more confidence that their work was in demand.

The energy efficiency coordinator wishing to remain unnamed says he faced the same thing within his CBO. Successful firms, he says, combine green retrofits with other work.

The choice for workers

Workers, meanwhile, had to consider making investments, too. In the Adirondack region, getting BPI certified means spending $700 just to take the classes, and then $450 extra to take the test, and every three years the certification* must be renewed.

“I’m in my job for three years,” he says, “why am I going to pay my money to get accredited, then I have to re-up again?”

Cornerstone is one successful contractor in the Adirondacks area, but in addition to offering construction and NYSERDA specialty programs, it also specializes in plumbing and offers HVAC service, installations and commercial work.

While upstate New York faces problems of low incomes and spread out counties, the city faces its own challenges with the Green Jobs Green New York program.

William Blair, director of adult education and workforce development at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, says of the GJGNY experience there that, “across the board we’ve been a very successful program.” But when Blair came on staff this past April, NMIC’s green certification programs were plagued by a 25 percent attrition rate. He cut it to 14 percent after noticing that people were dropping out about halfway through the course.

“My immediate thing was to look at it differently and say, ‘Let’s cut this short, reduce it by six weeks, but double the time during the day,’ so it became a six-hours a day program for six weeks,” he says.

After shortening the length of the course more people graduated the classes. Once the retention rate went up, Blair says he was able to make the class sizes smaller because they didn’t have to meet a higher number of retained students after factoring in ones who dropped out.

“When you have a smaller class, people can have more practical time, it’s more engaging, they get more attention from the instructor and I think that helps,” he says.

This series was produced by members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting course at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

* Correction: The original version of this article referred erroneously to the Business Performance Institute; the correct name is Building Performance Institute. And it is the BPI certification, not accreditation, that must be renewed every three years.

In rural areas, households using wood-burning stoves were sometimes turned down because, even if the environmental and health impact of a retrofit made it a no-brainer, the financial savings were fairly small.

It wasn’t solar panels, hydroelectric power or wind-generated electricity that was supposed to power New York State’s attempt to create a greener New York under the 2009 Green Jobs/Green New York Act—the program that aimed to spur massive numbers of property owners to retrofit their homes and buildings to reduce energy waste and create jobs.

The driving force for the program, at least when it came to reaching lower-income households, was on-bill financing—OBR for short.

With OBR financing, utility companies offer customers the option of adding the principal and interest amounts of the loan to their utility bill payments over the term of the loan. Applicants for on-bill recovery financing offered through the NYSERDA program can choose a loan term of five, 10, or 15 years. The vast majority of the borrowers interviewed for this story mentioned that they opted for the 15-year loan term.

The belief is that the cost savings of the energy efficiency improvements will offset the additional expense of the loan and that the retrofits will be “bill-neutral”. In other words, the total amount of the utility bill will remain more or less the same until the loan is paid in full, at which point borrowers will reap the cost savings benefits of their energy–efficiency home improvements — although the OBR Notice to Borrower explains that taking on the loan does not guarantee lower energy costs “over time.”

Using utility bills as a financing mechanism would, GJGNY’s designers hoped, provide a lower-income population burdened by relatively poor credit scores and relatively high debt-to-income ratios with a chance to get retrofits.

This did not happen, largely because the approach GJGNY took to implementing on-bill recovery undermined the program’s potential. Utility companies, lenders and ratings companies all made demands and decisions that made the approach a poor fit for households of limited means.

Utility companies balk

According to NYSERDA and a spokesperson from Con Edison, utility companies expressed concerns that adding loan repayments to their bills would increase monthly non-payments from their customers. That made utilities nervous in part because enforcing green-energy loans is difficult. Energy efficient loans are what’s known as “non-recourse” loans, in that no repo man is going into someone’s home and start ripping out their newly installed heating ducts. So, the only way utility companies could compel payment would be to shut off the lights.

The utilities didn’t want to have to act like loan sharks. So they insisted that customers’ payments be separated: Every month, the fee for utilities would get paid first, and whatever remained of a customer’s payment would go towards paying off the retrofit loan.

On one hand, this move failed to save the utilities from playing the bad guy: Termination of service (turning the lights out) is still the recourse for skipping an on-bill retrofit repayment, according to NYSERDA. However, this is a rare option. Lights can only be turned off during certain seasons and utility companies do a lot to make sure they avoid a lights out situation.

On the other hand, by separating the utility and loan payments, it meant that the ratings companies (who evaluate the riskiness of the bonds that underwrite NYSERDA’s programs) could not value these loans as utility bill payments, which all customers usually pay regularly. Instead, on-bill financing had to be considered a regular consumer-style loan, only available to homeowners with a credit score better than 640 and an “acceptable” debt-to-income ratio—undermining the whole point of on-bill lending.

Another problem, according to NYSERDA, is there was not enough data on on-bill financing for the ratings companies to verify that there would be a lower default rate on on-bill loans. This even though a comprehensive survey of OBF (“on-bill financing”) programs, dating back to the pilot program in Wisconsin in 1993, show significantly lower default rates among programs in 23 states.

Emmaia Gelman, who played a key role in the negotiations over the Green Jobs program while at the Center for Working Families, said that one reason that creditworthiness became the measure of the loans’ sturdiness was that socially conscious investors would not sign on.

“The problem was there were no lenders interested in providing capital with a low rate of return,” she said. “Lenders didn’t care that OBF shows a good repayment rate.”

An idea, undermined

The Green Jobs/Green New York underwriting criteria for both types of loans—traditional Smart Energy loans and loans involving on-bill financing — are divided into two tiers.

Tier 1 represents the more traditional borrower, who has a 640 credit score or higher, up to 50 percent debt-to-income ratio, no outstanding debt totaling more than $2,500 and is clear of bankruptcy, foreclosure or repossession within the last seven years.

Click here to read the rest of this series

Tier 2, on the other hand, offers expanded qualifications for homeowners with poorer credit. Applicants with credit scores as low as 540 can qualify under this tier as long as they’re current on all mortgage payments, free of outstanding debt totaling more than $2,500 and clear of bankruptcy, foreclosure or repossession within in the last two years. This is the household for which On-Bill Financing was designed.

The problem, though, lies in the debt-to-income criteria. Under Tier 2, applicants with a 680 or higher credit score can have a debt-to-income ratio of up to 80 percent. Homeowners with a credit score below 599 — often an indicator of more debt and less income — are only allowed up to 70 percent debt-to-income.

So while On-Bill Recovery’s credit score requirement is flexible enough to allow people with poor credit to apply, the underwriting criteria didn’t take into account the reality of living with limited income in an expensive city.

“In a housing market like New York City, a lot of [homeowners] have very high debt to income ratios because they’re paying off their mortgages,” says Jessica Bartolini, energy efficiency program supervisor for Chhaya CDC, which works with the South Asian population in Queens.

Chris Neidl, director of Here Comes Solar, has more than a decade’s worth of experience working with solar energy initiatives, both domestically and internationally. Neidl has no direct experience with the Green Jobs-Green NY program but believes, in principle at least, that on-bill recovery financing is an attractive option. The problem, says Neidl, is that perhaps OBR’s design made it poorly suited for those it was intended to help.

“The credit score requirements were actually quite high. I don’t know if they matched the intended population very well,” says Neidl. “It was certainly very good in terms of the term and the interest rate but how many low-income people are really eligible for that given the credit score requirements?” asks Neidl.

Upper income borrowers — which NYSERDA identifies as “market rate” or making more than $100,000 — made up more than half of the total GJGNY residential loan value between 2010 and 2015. By contrast, low-income (those making less than $69,050 for a family of four in New York City) and moderate-income (a family of four making less than $104,000) homeowners only made up 19 percent of nearly $75 million in energy efficiency loan funds, according to a report by NYSERDA.

What price, a cleaner home?

What makes retrofit programs complicated is there is virtually no way to track the savings brought about by an energy efficiency project. Savings on an energy bill are largely based on the activity of those using the outlets. So, the savings are always an estimate and NYSERDA says that they have no way of monitoring the actual savings in individual households that have taken out on-bill loans. If a consumer starts working from home, or a new family member moves in, the agency loses the ability to track the savings.

Sources say GJGNY was set up to falter when weighing the value of a particular retrofit. Loan amounts were capped at $25,000, and Neidl says he knows of individuals who contemplated the GJGNY financing but ultimately went with other options because they found the loan cap to be too limiting.
Meanwhile, NYSERDA also disqualified some low- and moderate-income homes because they were in such disrepair — a common problem among the lowest-income households — that the amount of projected savings would not justify the cost of the retrofitting, advocates say. In rural areas, households using wood-burning stoves were sometimes turned down because, even if the environmental and health impact of a retrofit made it a no-brainer, the financial savings were fairly small.

“The state had really good intentions, but the way that [On-Bill Recovery] was set up made it more complicated,” Oliver says.

Launched during a recession triggered in part by financial tricks that piled debt on those who couldn’t pay, GJGNY can at least be credited with not having layered low-income households in New York with a new set of IOUs. But it appears to have demonstrated that a retrofit program built on borrowing by people of limited means is doomed to fail.

“I’m not sure that I would say that On-Bill is intended for low or moderate income families,” said James Barrett, Chief Economist at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. “If you do have a home and have bad credit, maybe adding a loan to your debt stack may not be a good idea even though it should save you money.”

Without capital from the state, some say, low-income New Yorkers will likely be left out of the retrofit movement. Tayyab Buksh, construction services director for Neighborhood Housing Services of Jamaica, Inc., puts it simply: “[We don’t] encourage homeowners to take out loans because it will make them incur more debt that they can’t afford.”

This series was produced by members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting course at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

The GJGNY initiative aimed to help private homes, multifamily units and small commercial spaces pay for retrofits to increase energy efficiency.

Jose Segura, a self-employed insurance agent based in Albany, had fallen on hard times two years ago when he began his application for a loan to retrofit his house under the state’s Green Jobs/Green New York energy efficiency program. He had been out of work for some time and his home was in dire need of an upgrade. The heating system on the second floor of his two-story home was 25 years old and only working at about 30 percent efficiency. Segura did not want his family and his single tenant to freeze in the wintertime.

So he mailed in his application to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the agency overseeing GJGNY in the summer of 2014. Almost immediately, Segura’s application was denied. His debt-to-income ratio was too high.

Segura turned to Kathleen Langton for help. Langton is the energy program manager at AHP Homeownership Center, one of 12 constituency-based organizations (CBOs) recruited by NYSERDA to help individuals and business owners interested in energy efficiency improvements. With Langton’s help, Segura submitted the required documents—1099s, credit reports, electric bills, tax returns, and even his tenant’s tax returns. To improve his chances at getting approval this time, Segura paid down the majority of his credit-card balances. He thought this would improve his debt-to-income ratio and he would be approved the second time around. Despite Segura’s best efforts, he was once again denied.

Click here to read the rest of this series

“They don’t look between the lines. They just see black and white,” says Segura. “For somebody in my situation who is self-employed, it’s difficult.”

When Green Jobs/Green New York (GJGNY) launched in 2009, NYSERDA hoped to help New Yorkers lower their carbon footprint and reduce their energy bills through energy efficiency improvements. The years-long statewide initiative was composed of a few different programs to achieve this mission, one of which provided financing to private homes, multifamily units and small commercial spaces to pay for retrofits.

NYSERDA anticipated they would retrofit one million homes when GJGNY launched, but the actual results failed to meet the agency’s expectation. Instead, only 22,707 GJGNY loans were submitted since November 2010.

A City Limits investigation found that a litany of problems prevented GJGNY from reaching as many customers as it hoped—and, in particular, to include low- and moderate-income households in the benefits of energy-efficiency-retrofits. From the design of the financing mechanisms, to the criteria for loans, to the way applications were processed, GJGNY sapped the very consumer demand it was trying to spur.

Now that New York State is embarking on a new effort to reshape the energy market, some wonder if state policymakers have heeded the lessons learned from its earlier attempt.

Two paths to a greener home

Under Green Jobs-Green New York Act of 2009 and the Power NY Act of 2011, homeowners could apply for two types of reduced-interest financing to retrofit their homes: a traditional Smart Energy loan repaid in installments to NYSERDA’s loan servicer, and the flexible On-Bill Recovery Financing Program meant for low- to moderate-income borrowers.

Homeowners applying for either loan would first have their property assessed by a NYSERDA-approved contractor, who would determine the specific energy improvements needed and their associated costs. The eligible homeowner would then apply for financing, with approval allegedly taking as little as seven days from application submission, and repay the loan once the project, which can take three to four months, is complete.

The number of residential applications received has steadily increased between 2012 and 2015. During this period, the cumulative rate of denial for both loan types had steadily decreased from 31.4 percent three years ago to 22.9 percent in 2015’s second quarter. But the program is still a far cry from the transformative initiative it was supposed to be.

And while the loan program as a whole failed to live up to the hype, On-Bill Recovery was the greater disappointment.

According to NYSERDA’s monthly report, Smart Energy loans accounted for close to two thirds of the nearly 24,000 loan applications received and over half of the 9,364 loans closed as of June 2015. Smart Energy loans also make up the lion’s share of loan value for closed loans —nearly $64 million of over $101 million.

On-Bill Recovery loans pale in comparison. On-Bill Recovery accounted for a little over 3,000 loans closed, with a total loan value of $37.8 million. It also had a higher application denial rate: 20.67 percent compared to Smart Energy’s 17.66 percent.

Problems with process

Many of the constituency-based organizations tasked with recruiting loan borrowers say that, despite its good intentions, NYSERDA’s utility-based On-Bill Recovery, financed through a revolving loan fund, is a long and difficult process that excludes the very people it hoped to attract.

“There are a lot of different steps. There’s a lot of disconnect,” says Langton from the Affordable Housing Partnership’s Homeownership Center in Albany. “The poor people themselves are confused. I’m confused.”

By NYSERDA’s numbers, the Affordable Housing Partnership, which covers the Capital region, was one of the more successful CBOs in generating GJGNY loans over the last five years. Of the 1,591 applications processed in that area between November 2010 and June 2015, only 20.7 percent were denied — the third-lowest denial rate among the nine regions in the state.

But the final loan data don’t reflect interest in the program, which, Langton says, is higher than the application numbers indicate. The NYSERDA report excludes pending and withdrawn applications — and often, low-income homeowners have withdrawn applications even if approved because they’re frustrated with the system, she says.

“I can’t get people through the system,” says Langton. “That’s my problem. If I could get someone closed in 6 months, I would do handstands and flips because that would be great.”

Indeed, getting a loan approved was only half the battle. Of the nearly 10,000 On-Bill Recovery loan applications received over the last five years, nearly three quarters of the applications were approved but roughly a third were closed (meaning the project was completed), according to the June 2015 NYSERDA’s update.

In contrast, close to half of over 13,700 Smart Energy applications received were closed in that time.

Langton says the amount of paperwork and time the On-Bill Recovery mechanism requires can make the program unattainable for homeowners already facing a number of socioeconomic barriers. Eventually, low-income homeowners will give up on pursuing the loan.

“We can get a lot more done if it didn’t take so long to get things done,” says Langton.

And when a homeowner was denied, says Langton, Energy Financial Solutions would obstruct CBOs in helping their customers.

Langton says she has worked anywhere from six months to two years in helping homeowners find out why they were denied and how they can improve their applications because EFS wouldn’t provide access to application information. The company would cite privacy concerns, but even if customers would call EFS directly to give Langton permission to talk on their behalf, representatives would still deny her request. EFS didn’t return a request for comment.

Cost hurdles hamper New York City

Beyond the problems with how loans were processed, there were flaws in how the program sized up borrowers.

Some had to do with the disparity in cost of living. New York City traditionally has higher mortgage rates than any other part of the state, leaving downstate homeowners with higher debt-to-income ratios, says Jessica Bartolini, energy efficiency program supervisor for Chhaya CDC, which works with the South Asian population in Queens. NYSERDA figures show the city had the lowest uptake and highest denial rate in the program.

When it came to trying to serve lower-income borrowers, the program was cross-wired. It offered traditional financing to people with solid credit scores. To people with lower scores, GJGNY only offered loans if households could show low ratio of debt to their incomes. In NYSERDA’s 2014 annual report, debt-to-income ratio was the most commonly cited reason for loan denial.

Over the course of its contract with NYSERDA, Chhaya has only had one homeowner take out an On-Bill Recovery loan. Many others were denied because of debt, low credit scores or a previous foreclosure, Bartolini says.

In some cases, owners have faced a catch-22. One homeowner Chhaya worked with had a low credit score because he owed a substantial sum of money for his oil-heating bill. So Energy Finance Solutions denied him an On-Bill Recovery loan. That means he couldn’t afford to perform the retrofit to convert from oil to gas heating in order to lower his energy consumption — and, ultimately, improve his credit profile.

“The reason he has a low credit score is because his oil costs are so high, but he can’t get help to fix the issue,” says Bartolini.

Contractors and CBOs struggled

Homeowners weren’t the only ones affected by the problems with On Bill Recovery. Contractors were, too. When GJGNY’s financing program was first introduced, contractors would wait up to six months to be reimbursed for projects authorized under On-Bill Recovery loans, says Scott Oliver, deputy for Energy Programs at PathStone Corporation’s Rochester office. But contractors were able to get paid within a few weeks for projects contracted under NYSERDA’s more traditional unsecured Smart Energy loans, which are easier to understand, easier to process and easier to get someone qualified, Oliver says.

“This slow reimbursement along with the extra paperwork dis-incentivized contractors to offer On-Bill Recovery to their customers,” he wrote in an email to City Limits. “Many of the home performance contractors to this day do not let their customers know that it is available.”

Mike D’Arcy, NYSERDA Outreach Coordinator for RUPCO, Inc, says contractors can be put off by the time it takes to process assessment and loan applications, which would hurt their bottom line, while customers can have a hard time understanding the program to begin with, he says.

“You have to be the expert in these loans,” says D’Arcy. “There’s a lot of daunting paperwork. There’s a lot of back and forth that happens.”

But some contractors were part of the problem. Many did not work on weekends at the time that the legislation passed. This meant a homeowner would have to take time off from work just to be on hand for the contractor’s initial assessment, as well as additional work that might be necessary.

“Low-income and middle-income customers, they drop when you hit that problem,” says Stephen Edel of the Center for Working Families, an advocacy group that helped develop GJGNY. “Every single step is one more opportunity for people to say, this is just not worth it to me.”

Which makes thoughtful CBO outreach all the more crucial. When launching GJGNY, NYSERDA looked to contract CBOs that were already working in workforce development, housing and economic development within their communities. And Bartolini says the messenger has to really be trusted within these communities in order for the loan outreach program to work.

“There’s a lot of people who’ve had a bad experience with contractors or with the energy service companies that try to get people to switch their energy supply to that company,” she said, “so there’s a big lack of trust when doing outreach for this.”

But some CBOs showed far more energy than others in doing outreach. Through June 2015, PUSH Buffalo held 221 outreach events for GJGNY. RUPCO held 158 such events and PathStone 121. Most of the other CBOs, though, didn’t even break 65. Three organizations held five or fewer events the entire year.

A few CBOs City Limits contacted were hesitant to go on record about their loan program’s performance. Some even cancelled interviews last minute or eluded scheduled phone calls outright.

City Limits filed a Freedom of Information Law request with NYSERDA on October 2. The agency stated in its response that it would answer our request by December 23, but instead submitted its response on January 11. NYSERDA also declined requests for an interview but did provide answers to emailed questions. The agency downplayed the failures of GJGNY, focusing instead on the Cuomo administration’s new initiatives, reforming the Energy Vision and the Clean Energy Fund.

“We are using the knowledge we have gained from Green Jobs–Green New York to develop new energy programs under Governor Cuomo’s Reforming the Energy Vision strategy,” said a NYSERDA spokesperson. “REV will map a pathway to a stronger and healthier clean energy economy for communities and individuals throughout New York State, and will ensure that lower-income residents have access to the opportunities and benefits of the clean energy economy.”

It worked … sometimes

Not every GJGNY applicant tells a tale of woe. “We can’t say enough about it,” says Peggy Dechene of Hamilton County. Dechene and her husband Bob completed the energy efficiency upgrades in the summer of 2014. “I have referred probably three people since then,” says Dechene.

In the summer of 2014, Warren County resident Jason Bradley was paying a monthly pre-determined amount of $544 to his hot water and heating bill. At the end of the year, he either received a small refund or paid the balance on the account based on actual usage. But once the energy upgrades went into effect, those set payments far exceeded what he actually owed, because the usage had slipped so much.

“After about four or five payments, we were so far ahead that there was a problem where they didn’t want us to pay. We had to skip a month and then pay, then skip a month and pay, then stop paying period,” says Bradley. After factoring in the cost of his NYSERDA payments, Bradley estimates he saves about $62 a month since the energy upgrades.

There are also signs the program improved over time. Anne Gregson, a resident of Essex County, initially became interested in the energy efficiency improvements when the GJGNY program originally rolled out in 2010. But after an auditor came to her home to do an assessment, Gregson never heard back and abandoned the idea.

“There were some speed bumps back in the day, I guess,” says Gregson. By the time Gregson scheduled another audit earlier this year at the urging of her sister-in-law, the kinks seemed to have been worked out. “It went beautifully,” says Gregson.

As for Segura, he was ready to toss in the towel and give up on his application altogether. “At one point, they said I was making too much and then at one point, I wasn’t making enough. It was just very complicated. I didn’t understand a lot of it, to be honest with you,” says Segura. “And I’m an educated, smart person with a bachelor’s degree. If I’m having these kinds of problems, I can’t imagine what most people are going through.”

But Langton, who has a background in underwriting for the mortgage industry, convinced him to stick with the effort. With Langton’s expertise and assistance, Segura’s loan application was finally approved last fall.

This series was produced by members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting course at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

In 2009, then-Mayor Bloomberg announced 30 initiatives to create 13,000 jobs over the next decade. The city says the definition of a green job has changed so rapidly that there's no way to track whether that is occurring.

The Osborne Association has a multi-pronged approach to help formerly incarcerated people adjust to life on the outside—a big part of this is job placement. In 2009, a great way to do this seemed to be training people to enter the green job market, said John Valverde, the association’s executive vice president.

“At the time, it was a hot topic,” Valverde says. “We believed that there would be opportunity, particularly because this sector traditionally has been justice friendly,” he said, referring to green employers’ track record of hiring applicants with a criminal history. “We were very committed to this workforce development program,” he says.

Indeed, at that time, the prospect of a flourishing green job sector was hard to ignore. Money poured into state energy-efficiency programs from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (also known as the federal stimulus program) that emphasized developing a green economy. A labor union, Local 10, was even created to represent weatherization workers.

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Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs via a ten-year, $150 billion investment plan that would focus on advancing a clean-energy economy. One of his early moves as president was to allocate $500 million in green-job training programs, aiming to reach about 125,000 people.

Obama’s national call for green jobs was echoed on the local and state level. The next year, in 2009, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a 30-initiative program that would create 13,000 jobs over the next decade. “We hear a lot about the potential of green jobs as a driver of future economic growth, but often the rhetoric is not matched with a real plan to capitalize on opportunities,” the mayor said at the time. “The initiatives we’re announcing today will take advantage of the progressive sustainability practices we continue to put in place in New York City, and will create real green jobs by attracting and growing green businesses and helping the city’s workforce be prepared to meet the demand for green skill-specific jobs.”

And, of course, on the state level, the 2009 Green Jobs/Green New York Bill promised to create thousands of jobs over the next five years. “The Green Jobs Green New York program will create 14,000 good-paying jobs,” said then-State Senator Eric Schneiderman. And, he added, it would “enable New Yorkers who are looking for work to secure the kind of employment in energy efficiency, that really has a future.”

These would be solid, steady middle-class careers, politicians promised, and not the kind that required high levels of education—the type of career manufacturing provided in its heyday. The term “green-collar job” was coined by then-Obama administration “green job czar” Van Jones. The term took off.

The burgeoning new sector was hard to ignore, particularly to those in the business of job placement or job training—or those in the market for a new career.

However, seven years later, the sector has failed to materialize, at least not in the form promised.

In fact, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped tracking green jobs as a separate category in 2012. Obama’s 2009 green job initiative fell far short of his expectations: Rather than 125,000 trainees, the program produced about 50,000. Roughly 1 in 10 found employment, according to an audit by the Department of Labor’s inspector general.

New York State’s Green Jobs-Green New York program reports the creation of a mere 1,100 jobs. And the city’s Economic Development Corporation told City Limits that it was not possible to track the number of jobs created by Bloomberg’s 30 proposed initiatives because the definition of a green job is so rapidly changing.

Those who have tracked the green-job field in New York City say they’ve seen a greening of existing jobs more so than a flourishing new sector. Having green skills became more important for construction workers, building managers, and custodians, for example.

“People who are the custodians of schools, or the superintendents of apartment buildings, they’re now doing their jobs in a more energy efficient way. But it’s the same person who’s been retrained to do things differently,” says Ronnie Kauder from the New York City Labor Market Information Service, who authored a 2012 report on green jobs in New York City.

This is not to say that green skills aren’t important for job seekers today. James Eleby recently went through a green-jobs training program at Solar One in Long Island City, Queens. Since 2009 Solar One has been one of the city’s top green-job training outfits. There he earned his Occupational Health Safety & Health certificate, which is needed for construction work; a building maintenance certificate; and a green energy certification.

“It was a broad scale of ways of saving energy,” Eleby says of the training he received.

“This is the type of job that you want to bring home. You know what I mean? That you feel good about bringing home with you,” he says.

Not all green trainee stories are so positive. After serving 17 years in prison for assault, Johnny Parker, 47, was looking to find a place in the outside world. His career counselor at The Fortune Society, a non-profit organization that helps formerly incarcerated people, connected him with a green job-training program at Solar One. “I was so grateful,” Parker says of the opportunity. “It helped me stay busy, it helped me stay more productive on parole. The more information they gave me, it made me more reflective on what I want to do,” he says.

Solar One’s Green Workforce Training Program trains both job seekers and building maintenance staff in green-building operations and maintenance. They run courses in green construction, which includes solar-panel instillation, and the construction of green building envelopes.

While at Solar One, Parker became a strong believer of the green movement. He soaked in everything he learned about green technology and green buildings, and was excited to put his newfound passion and skills to work.

“I want to do something that makes a difference,” he says.

Since graduating over a year ago he has been searching for a green job, “There’s not an abundance of them,” he says.

He’s out of work at the moment, though he recently finished a construction gig in Chinatown. He was happy to have the work, but disappointed by the amount of waste he saw being created—this was not only not a green construction job, it was “un-green.”

Solar One says it does what it can to keep up with the evolving field. Right now that means focusing on its namesake energy source. “Solar has really taken off in New York State,” says Esther Siskind, Director of Programs at Solar One, of the organization’s decision to train students on solar panel installation and maintenance. “Governor Cuomo is investing a billion dollars in the solar industry,” she says.

Parker doesn’t regret his training at Solar One. If anything, he’s looking for a way to get back there. If there were a new training program he would be the first to sign up, he says, and is always looking to see if a job opens up at the organization itself. He thinks, too, that the skills he learned in green construction will make him a more competitive candidate, even if the job at hand doesn’t require them.

In some ways, Parker’s experience is similar to what Osborne was seeing its green job training graduates go through: Some of the skills they learned were useful in the field, but the field wasn’t a new sector of “green construction,” or “green building maintenance,” but rather a somewhat evolved field of construction and maintenance.

When the federal stimulus money dried up, a lot of the programs Osborne had been placing trainees in shut down, Valverde says. He decided that the so-called green sector wasn’t the best way to prepare trainees for the workforce—though some of the same skills are taught in current programs. “We kind of moved in the direction of moving that conversation into all of our work,” says Valverde.

In 2013, Osborne broadened the scope of the Green Career Center to include a wider array of trainings. Today, it is just the Career Center.

This series was produced by members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting course at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Gov. David Paterson signs the Green Jobs/Green New York Act in the fall of 2009.

On Oct. 9, 2009, then New York State Governor David Paterson signed the Green Jobs/Green New York (GJGNY) bill into law. Passed by the New York State Assembly and State Senate, the legislation promised to provide energy efficiency repairs and retrofits to homes throughout the state, while saving customers money through future energy savings.

Most importantly for a state and a nation in the midst of a recession, the government pledged to offer training and job opportunities for new careers in clean energy. Supporters projected that the bill would ‘green’ one million homes throughout the state, and create 14,000 new jobs.

Six years past its passage, the legislation’s results are mixed at best. Only a few thousand homes were retrofitted, and it’s estimated that the program yielded only a thousand or so new jobs—1,069 as of last summer, according to state officials. The explanations for its shortcomings are as varied as the different parties involved in its crafting, but many agree that GJGNY’s biggest challenges came on its way to the governor’s desk.

A mid-recession idea

In 2008, the Center for Working Families (CWF) identified ‘green jobs’ as a potential policy push for the upcoming session in the New York State Legislature. Dave Palmer, the executive director of the CWF from 2009 to 2013, says that policy directors at the organization believed they could be successful.

“It would help to combat climate change and make homes more comfortable,” he says. “The Working Families Party had a good deal of power in New York State so they initiated high-level talks with the governor.”

Gov. Paterson and legislators in the State Assembly and Senate commenced discussions behind-the-scenes with the CWF, which drew up a policy paper in consultation with the Center for American Progress that detailed how the program might work. The government would establish a Residential Retrofit Investment Fund (RRIF) to stimulate private capital investment to help pay for the program.

The program would also stir interest from low and moderate-income New Yorkers with on-bill financing, which is when investors would subsidize the initial cost of the retrofit and receive a small portion of that homeowner’s utility bill over the course of 10 years to get their return of investment.

$112 million in administrative costs would be available via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which allows state governments to procure proceeds from carbon auctions by private businesses. The program’s infrastructure and administration would be led by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and they would partner with community-based organizations (CBOs) and private contractors to target populations that had previously been ill-served by energy efficient repairs for retrofits and job opportunities.

Emmaia Gelman, who was a policy director at CWF during the GJGNY debate, believed the legislation could open new doors for underserved areas and demographics throughout the state, particularly in parts of New York City.

“It was going to create a large amount of jobs in communities typically left out of the job market and change people’s relationships to utilities,” she says now. “It was supposed to be economically transformational.”

The CWF was not the only interested party; labor activists, unions and CBOs all advocated for the bill’s passage, touting the promised economic stimulus and reduction in New York’s greenhouse emissions. It was a coalition of surprising bedfellows; Assemblyman Kevin Cahill thanked both the Environmental Advocates of New York and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers at the bill’s signing.

Debate over the bill largely took place behind closed doors, though a member of the Independent Power Producers of New York (IPPNY), a consortium of energy producers and manufacturers that advocated against green energy initiatives, filed a lawsuit claiming that the state had no authority to join RGGI. This endangered the program’s administrative funding. Conservative members of the Legislature also grumbled, and some suggested that it was a giveaway to left-wing interest groups.

But according to many who were involved in the talks, the biggest sticking point was an effort to attach job standards to the green-jobs financing.

Fight over job standards

The standards would have set a wage floor for contractors to meet or exceed: between $16 and $22.10 per hour, depending on the location of the company. They would also require contractors to hire two out of every four workers from the local community, and at least one in every four from groups traditionally underrepresented in the green construction business: women, people of color and low-income individuals.

For people at community-based organizations that had long focused on housing and environmental justice, the standards were an important opportunity to make sure that GJGNY not only created jobs but also brought low-income and minority individuals into the green energy industry. President Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had funneled some funding for green jobs in low-income communities, but state legislation was a chance to move away from federal money and toward a market-driven model.

“The thing about weatherization is that it doesn’t bring anybody out of poverty. It just keeps people from freezing to death,” says Taleigh Smith, who was with Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition at the time.

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Smith remembers the early drafting of the bill as an exciting time. Many late nights were spent negotiating with unions and service providers, crafting a long and detailed program to bolster hiring practices and empower their communities.

The CWF supported the standards that resulted from those talks, as did many community-based organizations and several contractors.

But many contractors worried that the standards would increase overhead and hinder effective recruitment.

“There was this clashing of visions for what the program was intended to be,” Smith says. “They had this kind of weak capitalist logic that having high standards for the workforce was going to drive up the cost.”

The Building Performance Contractors Association of New York State, a not-for-profit trade association representing more than 200 industry members, rallied 82 contractors in opposition to the job standards. In August 2010, they presented their concerns to NYSERDA, along with the list of names.

Jerritt Gluck of Bonded Building and Engineering in Long Island was among the BPCA contractors who expressed his misgivings about the standards at that forum.”The free market economy should be the basis for any industry,” he said in his comments to the NYSERDA advisory council. “Individual company policy should be just that, up to the company.”

Other contractors shared those misgivings. “The last thing we need is more government interference in our business,” said Doug Hawn of Artic Air, LLC, a Long Island company. “The need is not more bureaucracy but more sales so I can hire more people,” said Bruce McClean, of the East Syracuse firm Energy Savers, Inc. “Adding more requirements to this process will make Home Performance a dinosaur.”

Gelman always believed that wage standards needed to be mandatory for private contractors in the final bill. According to the CWF policy paper, the retrofit work that GJGNY would fund was often low-wage and nonunion. Since job creation was emphasized for vulnerable communities, Gelman wanted to make sure that jobs were available for individuals from those communities and that those jobs could support families.

“We had to have wage standards,” she says, “But everything we negotiated got thrown out in the Legislature.”

Though earlier drafts of the legislation indicated that wage standards were a topic of consideration, the final GJGNY bill in October did not include any mention of wage standards.

People knowledgeable with the negotiations differ on why wage standards were lost, but many said that NYSERDA was hesitant to enforce wage rules for private contractors, and state legislators believed that it was an encroachment on market principles.

“GJGNY was intended to both create good jobs and shape the local markets for energy efficiency improvement,” Stephan Edel, a policy director at the CWF, says about the process. “Some contractors and legislators opposed mandatory standards, but in the long run the real issue was that some of the staff at NYSERDA were never really convinced that labor standards should be part of the equation in the first place.”

Despite the loss of wage standards in the legislation, GJGNY passed with bipartisan support after respected Republican State Senator Thomas Morahan endorsed the bill. His support gave cover for other Republicans to follow suit. The bill passed unanimously in the Assembly and 52-8 in the Senate.

As the program rolled out, Smith began to see that the dispute over wage standards wasn’t so much contractors versus community groups, but upstate against downstate. She found that local Bronx-based contractors were amenable to hiring practices like the ones proposed for GJGNY: a wage floor and underrepresented, local hires. There was just one issue with using those contractors, she says: NYSERDA denied them bids when they applied for GJGNY projects.

Delays hit financing

Wage standards were not the only casualty in the GJGNY debate. On-bill financing was not authorized in the Oct. 2009 bill; that took until August of 2011, when Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Power NY Act of 2011.

It was supposed to be in the original bill, but “folks were more comfortable with the traditional means of financing as opposed to the more innovative way,” recalls Conor Bambrick, who was the legislative director for the Energy Committee Chair in the New York State Assembly from 2004 to 2013.

When on-bill financing resurfaced during negotiations in 2011, the CWF intended to revisit the question of establishing wage standards. But they found little traction for their argument. Instead, the CWF and NYSERDA agreed on a form of ‘aggregation’ that was coupled with on-bill recovery’s adoption in 2011 (though it was not included in the actual bill). Under aggregation, a CBO could partner with at least three local contractors, and if those contractors agreed to wage standards set by the CBO, the NYS Department of Labor would ensure that the contractors abided by them. To date, only two CBOs throughout the entire state have successfully adopted the aggregation model.

Governor Cuomo signed the second bill into law on Aug. 4, 2011, surrounded by its supporters. The backers included Gavin Donohue, the executive director of the Independent Power Producers of New York, who remarked that the legislation was long overdue.

“We must rebuild and expand New York’s energy infrastructure to meet the demands of the 21st century and grow our economy,” Cuomo said at the bill’s signing. “This law will lead to new investment and create tens of thousands of jobs across the state.”

With the adoption of on-bill financing, supporters of GJGNY were still optimistic for the program’s future. By 2015, that optimism would be far more tempered.

Lackluster results

Different explanations are proffered for why the program failed to generate the number of retrofits or jobs it promised. One problem might be the very breadth of those goals: perhaps GJGNY became the hammer for too many nails. At the bill’s signing, Assemblyman Cahill admitted that the legislation’s goals were three-fold: it was “designed to create jobs, lower energy costs for homeowners, non-profits and small businesses and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

It was no mistake that Cahill listed jobs first. The economic stimulus promised by GJGNY became its most potent selling point, particularly during the 2009 recession. New York State lost 291,000 jobs from July 2008 to December 2009, with 70 percent of those losses in New York City and the surrounding area. Advocates for the new legislation saw the potential and changed the name of the bill from Green Homes, Green New York to Green Jobs. The slight change illustrates a shift in perspective as to the legislation’s goals, as well as a shift in how it was presented to the Legislature. The emphasis on jobs helped when seeking the support of legislators because conservative Democrats and Republicans could placate constituents who viewed energy efficiency programs with suspicion by highlighting the bill’s economic boon.

Some, including Bambrick, worried that this perception left the bill unable to deliver on its biggest promise. “The jobs prospect of it may have been oversold to the detriment of the program,” he says. “I think the job numbers that were thrown around at the time, maybe left a bad taste in the mouth of certain groups that the program didn’t deliver what was promised.”

Gelman believes GJGNY also overemphasized green training, as potential employees learned how to retrofit homes before jobs were available. Gelman also says that the effects of climate change remained too ephemeral for some New Yorkers.

“It’s too distant,” she says. “You’re talking about implanting an efficient gas boiler, and those folks are using wood pellets to heat their homes.”

Private investors—who were supposed to supply capital for the repairs during the program’s early years—were wary of funding retrofits because they were concerned there’d be no return on investment. But the program also required potential customers to take out loans, which was unlikely in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.

“The country was still reeling from a debt crisis,” Edel says. “We didn’t really consider how reluctant families would be to take on more debt while home values were dropping, no matter how secure the GJGNY financing was.”

The delay in approving on-bill financing may have played a role in reducing the program’s overall appeal, although there were many flaws LINK in the way GJGNY approached financing.

Bambrick does point to successes that came out of GJGNY; it proved that on-bill recovery was a viable approach for future legislation, and there were new and diverse voices and coalitions contributing to the debates about New York’s energy policies.

The most silver of linings to come from GJGNY, according to Smith, was a stronger connection between upstate and inner city community groups who were at the table for the GJGNY drafting process, and who now are paying close attention to other green state initiatives, including Reforming the Energy Vision (REV).

“It was a success for New York State to have all of us talking,” she says. “All of us are smarter about what’s realistic and not in our community. I think we have a more sophisticated conversation now than we did in the beginning.”

This series was produced by members of the fall 2015 urban investigative reporting course at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.